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Before I "improved" my diet I always took Snickers - great for staving off hunger when you get in a bind for food.
After I improved my diet (now) I take roasted unsalted almonds and dried apricots. Same reason as the Snicker bars.

We like to picnic on road trips, so we take a cooler with picnic foods with us. Usually sandwich fixins, chips, fruit, cookies, sodas or juices. If we know we will have time at lunch and will be in a picturesque spot, sometimes we'll bring the tabletop gas grill and cook up some burgers or steaks.

I usually have some breakfast bars or granola bars too.

We buy our food at the grocery store - sometimes stop at fruit stands or farmers markets for the produce.

Being in the car all days requires light food that I can eat when bored. Fruit, crackers and sardines, or light sandwiches and lots of water and we fill up our coffee cups in the morning. If we are heading East to Tucson, we plan on a stop over in Dateland for a dateshake. It seems cruel not to have a little sugar.

I think it's a bad idea to eat heavy greasy food on the road, it just sits there making you tire more easily.

I definitely think it depends on the type of trip and the travel style of the people involved.

When we take road trips, it is very rarely a road-warrior type trip where we have to put as many miles behind us a possible before we stop. And we rarely actually eat IN the car - usually just have water between stops, or maybe we'll get some coffee to take with us or something. So picnics work great for us. A lot of times we combine a picnic lunch stop with a sightseeing stop. Other times our picnic stops are just at a roadside rest stop or we pull into a town and find a park. Either way, we like to get out of car for awhile.

But for other types of trips - like if I was trying to get across Nevada or something - I think I'd pack easy snacks and try to get across as fast as possible.

Picnics are fabulous. When my mom, my sister, my niece, my daughter and I went to England, we took a tour that stopped in Dover for lunch. We had packed grapes, apples, peanut butter, crackers, and cookies; we sat on the grass overlooking the ocean, gazing at France in the distance while the rest of our group sat inside a restaurant eating overpriced fish and chips.

tenthumbs - those are the best picnics. Once on a trip through Wyoming, we were on a secondary road that crossed the overland trail. It is open prairie there and you can still see the wagon ruts very clearly. It was lunch time, so we stopped, grabbed our picnic stuff, and walked along the wagon ruts until we couldn't see the car. We had our picnic and hung out right there were thousands of westward settlers had passed and perhaps stopped for lunch too. That was on a 2 week road trip from CA to CO - we saw tons of great stuff, but this is one of my favorite memories.